West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

This river was the most important slave market in the Delta, as a matter of fact surpassing in numbers of slaves exported any other single slave-dealing station on the West or South-West Coast of Africa.

According to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the slave-trade, this river and Old Calabar exported more slaves than all the other slave-dealing centres on the West and South-West Coasts of Africa combined.

It is a well-known fact that for about two hundred years the average annual output of slaves through the Bonny River was about 16,000 (this included the shipments from New Calabar), totalling up to the immense number of [3,200,000 souls] taken out of this part of Africa during two centuries.

The above figures do not represent the total depletion this part of Africa suffered during this time. To the above immense number of slaves exported must be added the number of lives lost in the raids made on the Ibo villages for the purpose of capturing the people to sell as slaves; we must also add the number that died on their way down from the interior to the coast, and to these again must be added the slaves refused by the European trader by reason of any defect, malformation, or incipient signs of disease. The fate of these poor souls was sad; but perhaps many of their brethren envied them their quick release from the cares of this world. The native slave-dealer was too practical a man to burden himself with mouths to fill that he could not immediately turn into cloth, rum, gunpowder or coral, so oftener than otherwise he would simply tell his own niggers to drop their canoe astern of the slave ship, cut the rejected slaves heads off, and cast their bodies into the river to feed the sharks, this often taking place within sight of the European slaver.

A very moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the slave-ship from the above-mentioned causes would be at the least 40 per cent.; thus totalling the immense number of 4,480,000 souls sent out of this one district in about two centuries. The greater number of these were Ibos, a slave much sought after in the olden days by planters in the West Indies and the Southern States of America.

I have mentioned these latter facts here to point out to my readers that the so-called benevolent domestic slavery as practised on the coast of Western Africa and tolerated in Her Britannic Majesty’s West African Colonies, must, as a natural consequence, lead to a deplorable loss of life, though not in so wholesale a manner as the export of slaves led to in former days.

The Bonny people claim to be descended from the Ibo tribe, but I should be inclined to think that their proper description to-day would be a mixture of Ibos, Kwos, Billa, and sundry infusions of blood from inter-marriage with the female slaves brought down by the slave-dealers from places lying beyond and at the back of the Ibo people.

Whatever their origin may have been, a commercial spirit is, and has been since their first intercourse with Europeans, a very highly developed trait in their character. As I have already shown, they were the greatest slave traders in Western Africa, and when that, for them, lucrative trade was finally put a stop to by the treaty signed on the 21st of November, 1848, between Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul and King Pepple, whereby King Pepple was to receive an annual present of $2,000 for six years—[previous to this, one, if not two treaties had been signed by King Pepple, with Her Britannic Majesty’s representatives, with the same object; but the greed of gain had been too much for his dusky Majesty, combined with the continued presence on the coast of the Spanish slave-dealers; one of the latter being established at Brass as late as 1844]—they then turned their whole attention to the legitimate trade of palm oil, and soon became the largest exporters of that article on the West Coast of Africa. Their trade in this article had not been inconsiderable since 1825, at which date the Liverpool merchants had seriously turned their attention to legitimate trade.

In 1837-38, the export of palm oil was already about 14,200 tons, all carried in sailing vessels principally owned in Liverpool, and mostly by firms that had been in the slave trade.